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$22.00 NZD

This is what talented New Zealand poet Owen Bullock had to say about it: Maureen Sudlow’s work crackles with detail, her poems like crisp autumn leaves. She writes of human misunderstandings and displacements, but grounded in nature and a sense of what endures in our lives. It’s
also great to see an accomplished writer of haibun including this form alongside contemporary poems....Show more

$30.00 NZD

In The Radio Room, Poet Laureate Cilla McQueen travels space and time, throwing 'thought-lines' from her present-day corner of the world to the ancient Celtic islands of her ancestors ('On a cliff-top above screeching gulls I stand still thinking backwards, antipodean poet grafted from ancient taproot i
n this bedrock' ...'if they spoke, what would they say? Could I understand that language at the root of my tongue?' Her point of view is at once small, interior and intimate ('I sit on an upturned apple box in the shade of my hat looking up through the pores of its straw') and in the next breath, flung outwards and upwards: 'Discovered in lenses, bent around stars. I leap island to island, altar to altar'. The collection is about the writing and reading of poetry, too: 'Poem in hand, the tendons slide and muscles smile under the skin'. 'Soapy Water' riffs on modern politics to play with this theme: 'world poetry is running low. Naturally, there is speculation in solar poetry, wind poetry, tidal poetry, all as old as mankind, since he learned to talk to himself'. Whether investigating the extinction of the natural landscape or space-time, molecules and mathematics, writing to her dear departed, watching an insect ('I am too big to be seen, like the weather'), or playfully pondering the perspective of a sock, McQueen's word-ware is as polished and intelligent as ever, and demands multiple readings to uncover each subtle layer. 'Poetry takes you apart, puts you back different' she intimates in 'Foveaux Express'. The Radio Room does just that. These are words to be visited again and again, by one of this country's most talented writers.In The Radio Room, Poet Laureate Cilla McQueen travels space and time, throwing 'thought-lines' from her present-day corner of the world to the ancient Celtic islands of her ancestors ('On a cliff-top above screeching gulls I stand still thinking backwards, antipodean poet grafted from ancient taproot in this bedrock' ...'if they spoke, what would they say? Could I understand that language at the root of my tongue?' Her point of view is at once small, interior and intimate ('I sit on an upturned apple box in the shade of my hat looking up through the pores of its straw') and in the next breath, flung outwards and upwards: 'Discovered in lenses, bent around stars. I leap island to island, altar to altar'. The collection is about the writing and reading of poetry, too: 'Poem in hand, the tendons slide and muscles smile under the skin'. 'Soapy Water' riffs on modern politics to play with this theme: 'world poetry is running low. Naturally, there is speculation in solar poetry, wind poetry, tidal poetry, all as old as mankind, since he learned to talk to himself'. Whether investigating the extinction of the natural landscape or space-time, molecules and mathematics, writing to her dear departed, watching an insect ('I am too big to be seen, like the weather'), or playfully pondering the perspective of a sock, McQueen's word-ware is as polished and intelligent as ever, and demands multiple readings to uncover each subtle layer. 'Poetry takes you apart, puts you back different' she intimates in 'Foveaux Express'. The Radio Room does just that. These are words to be visited again and again, by one of this country's most talented writers.In The Radio Room, Poet Laureate Cilla McQueen travels space and time, throwing 'thought-lines' from her present-day corner of the world to the ancient Celtic islands of her ancestors ('On a cliff-top above screeching gulls I stand still thinking backwards, antipodean poet grafted from ancient taproot in this bedrock' ...'if they spoke, what would they say? Could I understand that language at the root of my tongue?' Her point of view is at once small, interior and intimate ('I sit on an upturned apple box in the shade of my hat looking up through the pores of its straw') and in the next breath, flung outwards and upwards: 'Discovered in lenses, bent around stars. I leap island to island, altar to altar'. The collection is about the writing and reading of poetry, too: 'Poem in hand, the tendons slide and muscles smile under the skin'. 'Soapy Water' riffs on modern politics to play with this theme: 'world poetry is running low. Naturally, there is speculation in solar poetry, wind poetry, tidal poetry, all as old as mankind, since he learned to talk to himself'. Whether investigating the extinction of the natural landscape or space-time, molecules and mathematics, writing to her dear departed, watching an insect ('I am too big to be seen, like the weather'), or playfully pondering the perspective of a sock, McQueen's word-ware is as polished and intelligent as ever, and demands multiple readings to uncover each subtle layer. 'Poetry takes you apart, puts you back different' she intimates in 'Foveaux Express'. The Radio Room does just that. These are words to be visited again and again, by one of this country's most talented writers.In The Radio Room, Poet Laureate Cilla McQueen travels space and time, throwing 'thought-lines' from her present-day corner of the world to the ancient Celtic islands of her ancestors ('On a cliff-top above screeching gulls I stand still thinking backwards, antipodean poet grafted from ancient taproot in this bedrock' ...'if they spoke, what would they say? Could I understand that language at the root of my tongue?' Her point of view is at once small, interior and intimate ('I sit on an upturned apple box in the shade of my hat looking up through the pores of its straw') and in the next breath, flung outwards and upwards: 'Discovered in lenses, bent around stars. I leap island to island, altar to altar'. The collection is about the writing and reading of poetry, too: 'Poem in hand, the tendons slide and muscles smile under the skin'. 'Soapy Water' riffs on modern politics to play with this theme: 'world poetry is running low. Naturally, there is speculation in solar poetry, wind poetry, tidal poetry, all as old as mankind, since he learned to talk to himself'. Whether investigating the extinction of the natural landscape or space-time, molecules and mathematics, writing to her dear departed, watching an insect ('I am too big to be seen, like the weather'), or playfully pondering the perspective of a sock, McQueen's word-ware is as polished and intelligent as ever, and demands multiple readings to uncover each subtle layer. 'Poetry takes you apart, puts you back different' she intimates in 'Foveaux Express'. The Radio Room does just that. These are words to be visited again and again, by one of this country's most talented writers....Show more

$35.00 NZD

Shakespeare's sonnets are revered the world over for perfectly capturing the torments and joys of love, unrequited or otherwise, in just fourteen lines of iambic pentameter. Twenty-nine of the bard's most romantic sonnets are included in this beautiful hardcover, all of them lovingly illustrated by the
talented Caitlin Keegan. Pretty and contemporary, the illustrations tastefully accentuate the depth of sentiment in each sonnet. A brilliant sun rises over the 17th Sonnet ('Shall I Compare thee to a summer's day?') and a graceful animal adorns the 19th Sonnet ('Devouring time, blunt thou the lion's paws'). Available just in time for Valentine's Day but appropriate for any spontaneous expression of love, this is an ideal, sophisticated gift for the legions of Shakespeare fans.About the author:Caitlin Keegan is a designer and illustrator who has been featured The New York Times and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn....Show more

$30.00 NZD

Sam Hunt is New Zealand¿s best-known and, arguably, best-loved poet. Coming to it: Selected poems is the latest collection of Hunt¿s poems to be published. It is intended to replace both Doubtless: New and selected and Knucklebones: Poems 1962¿2012 (both out of print) to ensure that
a substantial selection of his poems remain available to the general reader. In Coming to it, a broad selection of Hunt¿s older poems sit ahead of his more recent work from Chords (2011), Salt River Songs (2016) as well as 19 brand new, previously unpublished poems written in 2018. As always, Hunt¿s unflinchingly honest, elegiac and moving poems roam around familiar themes of family, friends and lovers; landscapes and the play of the weather; and the challenges of ageing and mortality. Sam Hunt has had a remarkable and enduring career, and Coming to it is a fitting tribute to the quality of his poems....Show more

$25.00 NZD

Bill Manhire's first new collection of poems for seven years takes its title from his elegy for his close friend the painter Ralph Hotere, who died in 2013. At its heart is the sequence 'Known Unto God', commissioned by the BBC for the centenary of the Battle of the Somme in 2016. These are poems of mem
ory and mortality, which are also full of like and jokes and good tunes. Some Things to Place in a Coffin is published simultaneously with Tell Me My Name, Bill Manhire's new poetry + photographs + CD collaboration with composer Norman Meehan, singer Hannah Griffin and photographer Peter Peryer....Show more

$25.00 NZD

Bird turns her prescient eye on love and loss, and what emerges is like a helicopter in fog... or a bejewelled Christmas sleigh, gliding triumphantly through the contemporary aesthetic desert... this is at once an intelligent and compelling fantasy of tenderness... heartbreaking and charged with trees..
. without once sacrificing the forest.
Whether you are masturbating luxuriously in your parent's sleepout... or pushing a pork roast home in a vintage pram... this is the book for you... heroically and compulsively stupid... whipping you once again into medieval sunlight. But you know, do whatever you like lol...Show more

$28.00 NZD

Built around the abyss, the tightrope, and the trick that we all have to perform to walk across it, Pasifika poetry warrior Selina Tusitala Marsh brings to life in Tightrope her ongoing dialogue with memory, life and death to find out whether 'stories' really can 'cure the incurable'. In Marsh's poetry,
sharp intelligence combines a focused warrior fierceness with perceptive humour and energy, upheld by the mana of the Pacific....Show more

$25.00 NZD

John Dennison's first collection, Otherwise, is a finely crafted marvel. The poems here are concerned, above all, with love, and with the strange, unlooked-for manner of its appearances among us. Marked by an emotional acuity and formal deftness, the lyricism of Otherwise draws us into confrontations wi
th human equivocacy and finitude. A trio of elegies for poet Seamus Heaney is moving; a heart-shaking sequence recounts an encounter in Calcutta. Ranging globally from Scotland to Dunedin, Otherwise also sits firmly in the New Zealand literary tradition, with poems which take in Baxter's bees, Bethell's gardening, Duggan's amends and Curnow's 'surge-black fissure'. And here, too, because 'some things bear repeating', are singular moments of turning, of grace and our refusals. This is a moving, meditative and vulnerable manifesto from an assured new voice....Show more

$30.00 NZD

Wherever bodies of water are, people settle, and stories collect. Six generations of poet Airini Beautrais' family have lived near the Whanganui River, the restless, all-encompassing figure at the heart of her fourth collection Flow. Flow is a brilliant polyphony of stories - large, small, geological, e
cological, and human - that draw on many forms and voices and move through various stages of human settlement up to the present day. In March 2017, in a world first, the Whanganui River was granted the status of legal personhood. 'This remarkable sequence winds and eddies like the Whanganui River, filtering the region's many histories into something exhilarating and readable. Is verse the future of history?' --James Brown....Show more

$40.00 NZD

An award-winning collection of the best New Zealand poems for children, edited by star New Zealand poet Paula Green and illustrated inventively by Jenny Cooper.
Winner of a Storylines Notable Non-Fiction Award 2015
This exciting collection is truly a must-have for every home, school and library.
Burs
ting with wonderful poems that will make you laugh, cry, nod and ponder, this book is beautifully illustrated and makes a perfect gift book....Show more

$20.00 NZD

The trees breathe peace; their quiet strength enfolds us. We are comforted, reassured; in the bush we are never alone never lonely. The trees know patience their stillness allows the sun to penetrate and warm the bush and to provide gifts for me — a light on my path. A light on my path! Trees and
sun Peace and light Green and gold O trees, you silent friends you quiet filters welcoming the sun gentling its heat leading me on pointing the way. We’ve Seen the Glory reflects Bernadette's thoughts on the many tramps she has undertaken with companions. During these times she has felt nurtured by the natural world of untouched beauty, and this poetry captures the beauty, magnificence and splendour of the natural world, as well as the deep experience of being ‘close to the real’....Show more

$30.00 NZD

A fantastic new collection, including the classic poetry of Robert Louis Stevenson, Hilaire Belloc, William Blake, Rudyard Kipling and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Accompanied by beautiful and colourful art, this sumptuous package is the perfect companion to the Flame Tree Notebooks.